HAPPY SONGS FOR HAPPY PEOPLE

I love this group! The music, the attitude, the humor, the melodies, and pure originality of almost everything they write, but this one caught me by surprise. If you're a post rock fan then (IMO) Mr. Beast, and Young Team are two essential albums, and if you're a post rock fan then you DO own those albums, and should know that Mogwai are amongst the most influential groups in the genre they don't even consider themselves part of. Happy songs for happy people isnt the masterpiece this site has made it out to be though. It seems lacking in the areas that Young Team, and especially Mr. Beast excel in.

The albums shining moment is in the opener. Hunted by a freak is without doubt the albums biggest song, and in saying that, one of the bands biggest songs! The song takes a really simple arpeggio, some vocoder vocals, and multiple layers of keyboards to make an excellent dynamic song that evens runs in the standard pop structure of verse chorus verse bridge chorus. Throughout the rest of the album the group will go through varies different aesthetics, such as experimental (Moses I amnt, I know you are but what am I), Heavy(ish) (Killing all the flies, Ratts of the Capital), and pretty (Kids will be skeletons, Boring machines disturbs sleep), all of them solid, and excellent representations of the bands sound in their respective places. As an album though, with all this different sonic travel, and experimentation, I cant help but I feel a little empty at the end. There doesn't seem to be a prominent theme. The Title of the album is "Happy songs for happy people", but not all the songs are/make me feel happy/pretty, not all of them have heaviness, in fact very few of them do, and not all of them are experimental.

In the end, the album seems more or less scatter brained to me, like they put together a bunch of good songs, made throughout different periods of the bands history, past, present, and future, and kind of threw them all into a 45 minute long disc, with little thought put towards a central theme or idea. I may be roasting the music a little too much though, really all the songs are very solid, Kids will be skeletons is gorgeous, and Killing all the flies has one of the best bass lines this band became famous for since Young team. It's just that I feel a lack of composure, if some of these songs were thrown onto different albums, they probably would have only made those albums better, but seeing as that didnt happen, this album will get three stars from me.